Mumbai/Bengaluru: Founders of two of the largest Indian e-commerce companies - Flipkart and Snapdeal - escalated their online rivalry on social media over the entry of Alibaba.

On late Friday evening, Flipkart's Sachin Bansal took a potshot at rivals by tweeting, "Alibaba deciding to start operations directly shows how badly their Indian investments have done so far."

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, last week, announced its intent to enter the country's retail market this year. While Alibaba is a fringe player in its core business-to-business online trade, it has an indirect presence in Indian ecommerce through its investments - it invested over $500 million for a 40% stake in One97 Communications, which runs Paytm, a wallet and ecommerce company while Snapdeal raised $500 million from a clutch of investors including Alibaba last year.

Snapdeal founder Kunal Bahl sarcastically shot back, "Didn't Morgan Stanley just flush 5 billion worth market cap in Flipkart down the toilet. Focus on your business, not commentary," Bahl, however, ended his tweet with a smiley to take away some of the sting.

Last month, a mutual fund managed by Morgan Stanley has marked down the value of Flipkart's shares by 27%, signalling that global investors believe India's largest internet company is overvalued. Flipkart had said in a press statement that it is valued at $15.2 billion then. A 27% fall in Flipkart's share price would imply Flipkart's valuation came down to $11 billion.

"Attention grabbing techniques i call them. Flipkart and Snapdeal are two big names and Alibaba is a big party to talk about. This is also giving unnecessary attention to Alibaba which is set to overtake Walmart. This is a part of the branding strategy of the two parties which they have pulled off in the past as well" said Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy expert.

This isn't the first instance of their public spat on twitter. A year ago, Flipkart's exec-chairman Sachin Bansal took a pot shot at Snapdeal, saying India should not be blamed for the latter’s failure to hire ‘great engineers’. His tweet had come against the backdrop of a report where Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal was quoted as saying, “If you think about the landscape in India, not too many product companies got built here”.

On the marketing front, these online rivals have been aggressively taking potshots at each other in an effort to grab more market share in the $16 billion e-commerce market. For instance, Snapdeal has taken digs at Flipkart and Amazon with its campaign tag line: “You don't need a billion offers to amaze you. You just need to snap the best ones.” It also had about 100 billboards in 20 cities emblazoned with the phrase “Achha kiya bata diya, #YahanSeKharido” aimed at Flipkart, which was running the “Nahin khareeda? #AchhaKiya” campaign last year.

Even brick-and-mortar players have joined the party. Earlier this month, Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani, who’s never made a secret of his disdain for ecommerce rivals, released a series of ads that use word play to target the three main marketplaces--Flip the Cart, Snap the Deal and Amaz-Off.